Doppelgangers (14 page)

“In the old palaces of the world—about four thousand years ago—they discovered castration; the word, you see, means a fortress, an inner defense. They made the inner guard eunuchs. It gave a defense against interior treasons, at least in the harem, though at a big cost in energy. Now we castrate the mind. It is more efficient and more merciful. As that initial thinker of our revolution, Sheldon, called it, this is animectomy—he charged much psychoanalysis with being that. Sheldon was, in spite of his genius, a man of his time and a bit of a conservative—as, of course, was unavoidable. But, as with all real genius, you can use its protests as much as its propositions. And with a single word he put an instrument in my hand.” Without changing tone or looking up, Alpha remarked, “Go now,” and then, without a pause, “You will find it a little hard to believe”—the men moved off round each side of the two seated figures—“that these men actually notice nothing. But you will get used to it.”

What the guest
was
getting used to was a reviewing of the race between Alpha and Talpa. Had he been right? Was Talpa always in the lead? The underground could do quite a lot of conditioning, but generally with a good deal of violence and breakage.

As if to confirm his doubts, Alpha went on, “We have yet to find a type that is quite resistant, and all that go under are quite happy—appetite good, sexual energy fine, enjoy games, and show it in their quiet way. They don't make friends, but why should they? And altogether, friendship is far less common where kindliness and general openness are as common as they are today. Friendship, as Shakespeare and all the romantic poets knew, is a defense against the attacks of an unfriendly world and community.” A stab like trigeminal neuralgia went through his hearer. “Why stay in a walled city when the country is quite safe?

“There are a few who resist, and in those cases I do think that relieving them of their bodies is kindest—for them the change into a perfectly conditioned body would, I think, be a real imprisonment and spiritual suffocation. That's just why your case is so interesting to both of us—unique, of course, because you are a double—one of the neat paradoxes in which life delights. It would, as I've told you, be no use just obliterating your memory, when it is your face we want. Neither would a trusty be any good. Think of a case in which you were substituting and some hitch occurred where you had to gag, as it were, and extemporize. Think of the million crowd watching what they firmly believe is me, me at a loss and having to be prompted and pushed through the part. They'd know I was failing. It would be worse than my going on without help. The priest-king is absolutely sacrosanct, till his people see his failing. Then at once they kill him.”

A question came into the guest's mind, and he felt he would like a rest from this intensive discussion of his future—no longer private, yet all the more concerning him as he felt his identity practically gone.

“What became of the men in the kitchen with me?”

Alpha answered quite amiably. “The arrest was made, you remember, at night. By the two men who went to fetch the food each evening I dined here. They are highups, and the chief of police—of whom I'll be telling you in a moment—keeps up that show of watching for possible poison. I think it's a hang-over of the romantic age in the chief's mind. Policemen are incurably romantic, but I let him have his way—food brought in sealed container by agent one and then watched by agents two and three—you know the old formula. But you have to let men do things in the way that amuses them, so long as when it is a real matter of life and death they obey. For some reason best known to his rather slow, if methodical, mind—something to do with his filing system, I expect—he didn't make the periphery arrests till the next morning. He got the three assistants, and they were treated amnesiacly. They are at large now with just that tract of time they spent in that kitchen wiped off their memory—as used to happen in post-concussion amnesia. But, strange to say, the chef, whom I was told—and I viewed him also through long-distance televisor focus at work in his kitchen when I was also making the first look-over on you—was really rather a slow mover as most fat men are, got away. My chief of police is vexed, but on the whole that amuses me. Such people can do us no harm, but a policeman is rather like an anxious housewife: she always wants the house cleaner than it need be.”

The guest felt a certain small thrill of pleasure that the old man had got away; besides, it gave one something to think about, across this stream of unanswerable success and all-embracing power-planning. But he saw that he was expected to ask further questions.

“You said you wanted to inform me about the chief of police?”

“That certainly is your next lesson. Hardly anybody knows you are here. To be exact, of all that are capable of normal knowing and remembering, only the two who made the arrest—and they know only that you weren't killed or psychologically ‘pithed' at once—and Algol. Yes,” and he chuckled, “that is the rather romantic astronomic name that he chose! Let people choose their names and they'll tell you their characters—not what the name says, of course, but the kind of person who thinks up that kind of fancy mask. You may not know that after that last and dullest of the Revolutions, the Russian afterbirth of the Economic Revolution, there was that queer old reactionary, Lenin—quite rightly they mummified
him
—giving such theatrical names to his juvenile-minded leads! Kamenev, the Man of Stone; Stalin, the Man of Steel! So my chief of police, as soldiers in the old battle age used to get ready for the last war, is always getting ready for the last revolution. You can never get a man of action ever really to live in the present. But he has served his purpose, and I don't like to take away his fun of living over his past coups, though there is less and less to coup. So he recuperates by memory,” he laughed.

“Besides, he could be a really awkward customer if you didn't give that spider-mind plenty of webbing to spin, even if there are fewer and fewer flies to catch. I sometimes say to myself that if this Mole he is always talking of really exists he's really a blessing, for he keeps Algol from spinning flytraps and webs round all of us. He would love to be making new rules all the time in order to be able to keep on arresting people and having to catch dangerous undergrounders. I believe that in his heart, as soldiers hated peace, though they said they fought to win it, he hates the success of the final Revolution. He hates the fact that we are really in the tradition of Lao-Tze and not of Machiavelli and that just making people comfortable has worked, while threatening them has failed; just getting them what they want has made them quiet, while continually threatening them and attacking them kept the revolutionary wheel spinning forever. It is so hard to make a man of means not fall in love with his means and not fall in passionate love with repeating his old successes when they are no longer apposite. A good fellow in spite of a native stupidity, and a clever man, in spite of some considerable cruelty. He really ought to be treated, and I've often suggested it to him. But I have never really had time to make a point of it, and he always has some excuse for putting me off. Now, when I have more time, that is one of the things to which I must and will get down.” He yawned easily.

“Oh, yes, there are a number of things I shall enjoy doing now that I have a little leisure from the routine work which will be taken off my hands. Meanwhile he is Pluto to my Jupiter and he knows his position, though at times I'm sure he thinks he'd make a far better king of the day than I do. But he is born for the night, he's moon to my sun, and now that the sun is at zenith he has less and less place in the sky, and the future.”

The host paused. Then his mind took a wider sweep. “No one really understands what I've done. I've rolled all the past three revolutions into one and taken the odd little efforts each made to solve its particular problem and incorporated them all into one comprehensive art of living. That is why this is the last revolution: because it is the beginning of rightful progress, of a new cycle and eon of evolution. Revolution occurs because pressures are let accumulate, the crust chokes back the yeast, and then there's a burst. But evolution is the rule, and, after these adolescent efforts at alteration which have gone on like a recurrent fever for the last six hundred years, I have shown mankind how to grow without convulsions every time it cuts another tooth.

“But I have had to make a number of discoveries and inventions, not merely the ones I made simultaneously to bring off the beginning of this the last, the Psychological, Revolution. Then I had to solve the problem of how to stop the thesis of Liberty and the antithesis of Order strangling each other and exhausting all mankind. Freedom and Plan, like the Gladiator and the Retiarius, had dueled until the only end seemed that both would be destroyed. Then I saw and intervened with the synthesis.

“But just the idea would have been no good had I not also seen that men are of two types, really three. The first wants to enjoy itself and be left alone. The next has to be found activity or it will pull everything to pieces and drive the poor stick-in-the-muds until they are mad or dead. The third thinks things out and sets these two lower types to do what they want without getting in each other's way. But once I had done that, and you must own it was much, then I had to see I had only begun. Having made a settlement, I mustn't settle down; having prevented another misbegotten revolution and put a live birth in its place, I must be prepared to carry through and on.

“I saw that all the other Revolutions had themselves been in three parts. First were the actual revolutionaries, thinkers who were completely abstractionists—as we used to call them, rationalists. Then came the man of actuality and action, instead of theory. The doctrinaires were demoded by the opportunist. He had to be a reactionary because he had to find something precedental and once-accepted to take the place of all the theorizing that hadn't worked. So you get the Napoleon type—what a blunderer!—not only a man of no nerve but of no vision. Do you realize, when he had time, seated out on St. Helena, to review the world, he never foresaw the industrial revolution in all his wordy prognostications? He was so blind that he not only couldn't see an inch into the looming future, but when he had to find a footing he had to go right back to the Roman base. That's really to play the Roman fool—not suicide, as Shakespeare thought, but Imperialism—the military dictatorship. But he was forced to make some discoveries involuntarily. He found he had to dress his part and that his figure was more effective for cohesion than his speeches. He found that the ‘
redingote gris
' was a better rallying symbol, its plain mass amid the deliberately-made-gaudy marshals, than the imperial bee-spangled purple. Nap saw that some kind of slow movement had to come in. For he was to maunder about his son being a king of peace, but he couldn't see his way round.

“So, too, the poor old Russians, always behindhand, always holding the world back. First they ‘afterbirthed' the Economic Industrial Revolution, when for a generation it had already miscarried in the Economic-industrialized countries, and then had to make their Lenin into a mummied Pharaoh and, finally, call back the Greek Orthodox Church. Slow movement and coda, you see, once more.

“It was that phrase, ‘slow movement,' from the art of music, that gave me my next insight. Epochs, like individuals, have to grow up, but, like most individuals, they die from the excesses of their youth. The first movement can be vigorous but, after its initial splash and dive, then the swimmer must strike out slowly and steadily. I saw that.

“I had seen that militarism was as out of date as democracy. I saw that the future of the way up to power no longer lay over battlefields, because war weapons had become instruments of ludicrous imprecision—the atom bomb, like a huge period-mark, closed that, the soldiers' frank, bullying way, in which you club everyone impartially over the head. I saw that the next revolution would be made by secret police, by mining from within, by the discrediting or the capture and conditioning of all key men who made or could make trouble, and by propaganda, mainly amusing, debunking, ridiculous-making jokes and lampoons; and by getting ‘noble' characters into ‘discreditable' situations. I bought up scores of funny papers and put the men who liked debunking in to edit them with a free hand to attack and make ludicrous patriotism, militarism, all provincialism and all drill. I had comic songs made that guyed the whole bloodthirsty lot, and the songs and the cartoons stuck. It became silly to be patriotic or to care for arms—childish. Then the better people I won by argument and found places for them, so that the tough didn't know what was promised the tender-clever and the tender didn't know what the tough did.

“Though all my work was scientific, I had really no more use for a brute, still less for a sadist, than has a surgeon for that type as one of his dressers or nurses. No, my men had to be cold but never violent. Sometimes it was difficult to manage. Algol, I've told you, was at times a problem. But, of course, all that is over, and I mustn't run on into anecdotage.

“Besides, it was much more brilliant and interesting to turn from this still rather gaudy fanfare to the next stage—the wholly original phase, the slow movement when one had to conduct the vast orchestra of more than half the world down into the quieter, more sustained passages after all the crashing chords. Now, after having been the irregular leader, the mysterious unknown that was the brain always thinking up new surprises and always suspected but never defined, I come out into the open and take on the part which can sustain the pressure of repetition, peace, and relaxation. I saw I must become that ancient enduring type, the priest-king, of whom Confucius, the architect of the most enduring society the world has known, says, ‘As long as the Emperor—or rather, the Son of Heaven—sat still looking toward the south, all went well.'